A novel immersed boundary procedure for flow and heat simulations with moving boundary

This article describes a novel immersed boundary procedure for computing the flow and heat transfer problems with moving and complex boundary. Although the immersed boundary techniques have been successfully implemented to these flow and heat simulations, a frequently encountered drawback of this method is the relatively low accuracy proximate to the boundary due to the spreading of forcing function or the interpolation scheme. In this study, we propose a moving-grid process under the arbitrary Lagrangian–Eulerian framework to reduce the numerical diffusion near the immersed boundary. The incompressible Navier–Stokes equations are discretized spatially using unstructured finite element method, and advanced temporally by an operator-splitting scheme. The methodology is validated by the simulations of flow induced by an oscillating cylinder in a free stream. The capability of the proposed method is further demonstrated by good predictions of flow passing the rotating fan in a channel and also flow driven by two independent rotating fans in a circular cavity.